


Prep Please!

by Lysces



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Anxiety, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Drug Use, Eating Disorders, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of suicidality, Multi, POV Jack Zimmermann, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Prep School AU, Slow Burn, Trans Character, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2018-10-28 05:59:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10825206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysces/pseuds/Lysces
Summary: Jack's brief stint in the QMJHL ended suddenly and badly.  His presence at the small, preppy, out-of-the-way Samwell Academy is nothing more than a compromise with his parents to stay out of a mental institution.Jack's fine with it.  Really.  He's fine.  F I N E.  And he will be as long as he forgets his past and ignores his future.At least he's still playing hockey.





	1. A Decent Approximation of a Hockey Player

The August sky was endless over the Academy, and it seemed much farther away than Jack was used to.

For all that the campus took pains to be aggressively picturesque, all he really cared to do was go haunt the ice arena—two rinks, spacious locker rooms, a trainer’s office, and a weight room featuring more equipment than most high schools could dream of affording.  This tiny, expensive prep school was chosen as much for its excellent hockey program as it was for its out-of-the-way location in a wealthy Ohio suburb, far away from the fraught world of Juniors and the press and Kent fucking Parson.

He had fallen far enough behind thanks to the events of the last year that he had to repeat his junior year.  It was fine.  It was all fine.  Leaving the Q was fine.  Being shipped away to a boarding school in fucking Ohio to try to collect his scattered marbles back together.  Was.  Fucking.  Fine.

He was fine with it, okay?  It’s fine.

Jack’s fine.

His parents really didn’t need to help him move into his dorm, but they seemed to think they did.  His new roommate, another Canadian student named Justin, introduced himself and stood around awkwardly for a minute before fleeing Jack’s glare.  He maybe felt a little bad about that, but he could hardly dwell on it because of how busy he was being totally fine with all this.

“It’s so beautiful here during the summer.  Look at all that green space.  I’m sure it’ll be a nice change from living in the city,” his mother commented, looking out the little window in the cinderblock wall.

He made some noncommittal sound and hoped that they would take the hint that it was time from them to leave.

“I saw there was a trail through the woods that takes you around the lake.  I have no idea what a high school needs a lake for, but it’d be a nice place to run.”

“I’m already here,” Jack said.  “No need to try to sell me on the school.”

It wasn’t like he had much of a choice in the first place.  It was either this or being institutionalized.

This was fine.

When his mother finally went to get the car, his father turned to him, and Jack really didn’t want to hear whatever he had to say.  Anything he said now either wouldn’t be good or wouldn’t be true.

“We’re both very proud of you.”  Not true—he was a colossal fuckup, and the whole world knew it.  “We want you to be happy here.”  Here being very far away from them, from the eyes of the media, and from his aspirations to professional hockey.  “You’re seventeen—” Jack would give him that one.  “—and you don’t need to have your life figured out right now.”  His life was a train wreck, and his future had gone up in smoke.  “Right now, I just want you to focus on being happy.”  Try not to kill yourself.

He put his hands on Jack’s shoulders.  “Are you going to be okay here?”

Jack looked away.  “I’m fine.”

 

Samwell Academy was a 144-acre piece of land that was once the estate of a millionaire oil baron.  After he died, he donated the estate to be converted into a school.  Having math class in what was once the dining room of a mansion was truthfully kind of cool, even if it probably wouldn’t help him learn math.  The old manor house was fascinating in itself, if only because it unapologetically showed off both its age and its ostentatious expense.  There were, of course, other buildings added to the school: another classroom building, the dorms, the gymnasium, the natatorium, the ice arena, the fine arts building.  There was a baseball stadium and a football field that had lines for soccer and lacrosse but not for football.

It was eerily empty two weeks before the school year started, but the population of 400 students was unlikely to fill up all that space.  The fields were as much of a gaping, sucking hole as the sky.

According to his roommate Justin, a returning sophomore, there were a few distinct classes of Samwell students.  The first consisted of stupidly rich kids who mostly lived in the McMansions near the school.  They were the owners of the sports cars in the parking lot that reeked of weed and booze and sex if you walked too close to them.  They were also, apparently, particularly active in the school’s lacrosse program.

The second group were students whose parents couldn’t afford 40K a year in high school tuition but who had impressed the school enough to earn scholarships.  These students were a little less obnoxious and a little more diversified in their interests.  They were the stars of the debate team and the science Olympiad, but also the stars of the field and the stage.

The third group was made up of the foreigners, the kids who lived in the dorms.  Within this third group, there were two subgroups: hockey players and academics.  These were the only two reasons for someone to notice this school from anywhere outside of its immediate surroundings.

Samwell had four hockey teams.  The varsity A team was for the players who were actually good at hockey.  The varsity B and JV teams were for those who were still working on it.

“That’s only three teams,” Jack interrupted Justin’s explanation.

“The fourth team is the women’s team.  They’re pretty good, and sometimes they practice with us.  _Never_ try to date any of the hockey girls.”

“Noted.”

“Tryouts are in a week.  The only people on campus right now are staff, dormers, and people involved in fall sports.  Hockey’s kind of year-round though.”

“What team did you play with last year?”

“I made the A team, I think by the skin of my teeth.  We did alright, although I didn’t see a ton of ice time.  It was a really big shift from playing rec league.  They don’t mess around about hockey here.  Have you played much before?”

“Uh, yeah.”  Had a Canadian hockey player really not recognized him?  Had he really not recognized his father?

He must have been giving Justin a weird look, because he looked confused for a moment.  Jack could almost see the instant the light bulb clicked on in his head.

“Wait, you’re—”

“Yeah.”

“And the guy with you before was—”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.  Wow.”  The level of awkward in the room increased sharply, and Jack knew that he knew why he was there.  “That’s—wow.  Our team is going to be crazy good this year.”

Jack nodded.  Jumping down from the Q to play at the high school level kind of felt like it should be prohibited.  In fact, it probably would have been if he had actually made it through a full season in the Q.  “I hope so.”  Then, wanting to shift the attention away from his failed hockey career: “So, tell me about the team.”

 

On the first day of tryouts, sixty-two hopefuls showed up in Samwell’s ice arena.  Many were returning players, but a good number were students like Jack who obviously didn’t know many people here yet.  They were split up between the two rinks and put through a few drills.

It was easy, or it would have been if Jack weren’t terrified that someone would recognize him.  He wore a number on his back instead of his name, but he still made a point to keep his face hidden behind his face shield.

How was he going to do this?  The part of hockey that wasn’t actually hockey, the working in a team.  They would know.

They would know, and that wasn’t fine.

On the first break they were given, Jack hid in the bathroom and tried not to spiral into a panic.  His hands, as soon as they were off his stick, began shaking.  The grimy bathroom walls felt unreal, the air hissing too fast between his teeth felt unreal, he felt unreal.

Fifteen minutes and 438 breaths later, Jack was back on the ice and his hands didn’t shake as they held his stick.  He was, however, tired down to the bone.  Fortunately, even tired and wired he could still keep pace with these guys.  He could probably play hockey in his sleep.  He even had the dubious advantage of previous experience playing while coming down from an attack.

When he was on the ice, he never needed to pay attention to his breathing; his body did it for him.  When his heart sped up, it was the steady beat of exertion and not the frantic race of panic.  Under the white light of a hockey rink, everything looked sharp and crisp and tangibly real.

On the ice, he was fine.

 

After the first day of tryouts concluded, Justin pulled him aside on the way back to the locker rooms.

“Hey man, a couple friends and I are going to go grab some smoothies, wanna come with?”

This was the hard part of hockey.  He really could go back to their room and breathe for a few hours until he feels like he’s mentally prepared for tomorrow, but….  “Sure.”

He cleaned up and piled his bag on top of Justin’s in the back of a topless, doorless black Jeep Wrangler that belonged to the tiny girl in the driver’s seat.  Her copilot was a baby-faced kid that Jack recalled had a very loud mouth during the tryout.  One of the big, blond defensemen was leaning against the frame of the car and laughing with him.

“Hey guys,” Justin said.  “This is my roommate, Jack.  Jack, this is Lardo, Holster, and _Beauregard_.”

“Oh, fuck you,” the baby-faced kid said.  “Call me Shitty.”

“Just not where the staff will hear you,” Lardo said.  “You’ll get detention.  Now everybody get in or I’m leaving without you.”  He squished into the backseat with Holster and Justin, which was a very tight fit.  Half-hanging out of the side of the Jeep and entirely afraid for his life and limb as Lardo gunned it twenty above the speed limit through the upscale residential area, Jack listened to the boys whooping into the wind over the blare of the speakers, and he had some realization that this must be what life for normal people is like.  Well, if by normal people he meant rich neurotypical kids who weren’t heirs to an enormous hockey legacy.  He didn’t really know what he meant, but he knew that this was new and, despite the terror and threat of deafness, he kind of liked it.

Lardo parked haphazardly in front of the unfortunate smoothie joint and unapologetically said, “Sorry for the turbulence.  I’ve only had my license for three weeks.”  Jack mentally added one more to his tally of near encounters with death.

Sipping on a Berry Blue and sitting on a curb in the sweltering August sun, Jack learned that Shitty was in his year and presently at war with the school administration for its oppressive dress code.  “Justin” was in fact called Ransom by everyone on the team—an incredibly cool nickname—and was Holster’s best friend.  They and Lardo were only sophomores but were already pushing and shoving their way into prominence on their respective teams.  Lardo, in a twist that had surprised their coaches, was elected captain of the girls’ hockey team after her first year on it.

“I dunno, man,” she offered in half-assed explanation.  “I get shit done.”

The next day, walking into the rink was easier knowing that he would see the four of them there.  Shitty plopped his stuff down in the locker next to his and chattered at him until he disappeared into the adjacent bathroom to get changed.  He guessed he had friends here now.

Instead of having a panic attack in the bathroom again, he spent the break sitting on the floor with Shitty, Lardo, Ransom, and Holster and scarfing down granola bars.  At one point the goalie he had been shooting against earlier came over and clapped him on the shoulder.

“You’re the best goddamn shot on this team, Zimmermann.”

His reflexive thanks froze on his lips as he realized the goalie had just furthered the plot by revealing his famous last name to his new friends.

“Good luck with the new team.  You’re going to be great.”  And he walked away, his face out of frame throughout the entire interaction.

Jack looked back to his new friends to see them looking pretty unmoved by this new revelation.

“Didn’t know you were _that_ Jack,” Lardo commented.  “I guess that explains why you’re so good.”

“We’re lucky you picked Samwell,” Holster said.

“Hell yeah,” Shitty added.  “Welcome aboard, Jack.”

 

On the third and final day of tryouts, the coaches arranged them into makeshift lines to see how they played together.  Ransom and Holster, having been partners last year, were immediately matched and seemed to have some kind of psychic link on the ice.  Jack was switched often between lines, the coaches seemingly at a loss for what to do with him.  He sometimes had Shitty on his wing, but by the end of the day he was spending most of his time with an absolutely tiny freshman on his wing.

And damn was that kid fast.

He didn’t catch his name, but he had the number 32 pinned to his practice jersey.  He didn’t have excellent puck-handling skills, and his shot needed a lot of practice, but he made up for it in speed, agility, and an instinctive feel for the flow of the game.  Jack was—tentatively—impressed with the kid who it seemed would likely be his linemate.

That was, until Holster came at him and he damn near fainted: he dropped his stick and curled into a ball on the ice.

Well, it looked like Jack would have someone else on his line.  There was no way that kid was making the top team now.

Jack left with the understanding that he would receive a call from a coach within a few days about his placement on a team.  He and Ransom had barely made it back to their room before his phone buzzed.

“I made the A team,” Jack said as soon as he got off the phone.

“Well, we knew you would.  Now we just have to wait and see whether the rest of us did.”

“You did,” Jack assured him.  “There wasn’t a better defensive team than you and Holster.”

“Thanks.  That means a lot, coming from you.”

“I expect Shitty did too.  He had a good day today.”

“I know Lardo was pretty happy with the new girls they got this year,” Ransom said.  “She needed another goalie and she got a good one.”

“That’s great.”

“Just so you know, we go to all of their home games.  They come to ours; it’s only fair.  We have a good thing going with them, so don’t, like, be a sexist asshole to any of them.  Not that I think you would.  And also don’t try to hook up with any of them.  It makes it weird.”

“I wouldn’t.  No worries.”

“Okay, great.”  Ransom’s phone began ringing.  “Oh boy.  Here we go.”  He answered the phone.  “Justin Oluransi.”

Jack watched as Ransom listened, his face impassive.  “And Adam?”  Ransom nodded, although obviously the motion could not be seen.  “Thanks, Coach,” Ransom said before hanging up and letting out a deep sigh.

“Well?”

“I made the team.  We both did.”

“Nice!  Told you so!”

“Yeah, just…I was worried.  I worry about this kind of stuff, y’know?”

“Yeah, I know.  I do too.”

“Really?  You?”

“Yeah,” Jack said.  “Think about it.  I’ve got expectations to live up to, and so much respect to lose if I fuck up.”

“But you’re only seventeen.”

“So?  What’s that got to do with it?”

Ransom hesitated a moment.  “Look, I don’t want to say that no one cares, but I don’t think people are really going to hang on to the things you do before you go pro.  I mean, I could tell you all about my favorite players in the NHL, but I don’t know really anything of what they did before they got to the NHL.  Like, it matters what you do now in terms of being ready for bigger teams later, but it doesn’t really matter if you screw up now.  Everybody knows you’re just a kid; they’re not going to remember in a few years.”

“I think it depends what you screw up.”

“…Yeah, I guess it does.”

“I think people are going to remember what I did.”

Ransom was silent for a beat, then: “You totally don’t have to answer this, but what did you do?  I legit have no idea.”

“Wait, really?  Is it not common knowledge?  It made the press.”

“I don’t know,” Ransom said.  “They talked about you dropping out of the Q, but nobody really seemed to know why.  There was a lot of speculation, but nothing solid.”

“And what did they say?”

“Well, some thought you got sick.  One thought you secretly hated hockey and had finally stood up to your dad about it.  Some gossip rag said you had a big falling out with Kent Parson.  Probably the one I believed the most was the one claiming you took a break so you could have a normal high school experience.”

“Huh.”

“Were any of those close?”

“Well…”  They were all decent guesses, but none got to the heart of it.

“You don’t have to tell me!  It’s fine!”

“Thanks.”  Jack would happily take any opportunity to _not_ talk about the last year of his life.

“But just tell me one thing, man.”

“Okay?”

“Are you alright?”

Jack sighed.  “I’m fine.”

 

They would have one full week of practice as a team before classes started.  They were thrilled to receive a locker room all their own, which meant they no longer had to lug their gear to the rink every day, and Jack set up permanently in the locker next to Shitty’s.

Shitty seemed to grow louder every time Jack saw him, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.  He provided a comfortable contrast to Jack’s long, sullen silences.  He was a good person to stick around, although Jack suspected he would be the sort to stir up trouble once school started.

Jack counted twenty-one players in the locker room, but just as he was lacing up his skates his count grew to twenty-two.  The door was shouldered open by none other than the tiny fainting freshman, who for some bizarre reason was carrying a platter of cookies in addition to his gear.

“Sorry I’m late, y’all,” he said with a sunshiny smile.  “I brought cookies!  Now, quick thing, I’m going to need you to let me know upfront if any of y’all have food allergies.”

As the team swarmed the cookies, egged on by their odd goalie, all Jack could do was stare incredulously at the clearly lost little baker who had stumbled his way onto a hockey team.  Why on earth was he here?

“Now boys!  Let’s make sure there’s enough for everyone,” he laughed, ducking out of the pile and offering the very last chocolate chip cookie to the only person who hadn’t moved to take one.

It was a magnificent cookie.  It looked like it would be the perfect degree of chewy, like the brown sugar to butter ratio was perfect, like the chocolate chips would begin to melt as soon as it was bit into.  And that bright smile was still in place on his sweet, innocent face.

“No thank you,” Jack said curtly.  “I have practice.”

Jack didn’t wait to see his reaction, instead going back to lacing up his skates.  His presence here had to be a mistake.  He couldn’t even take a check!

But the following practice proved it was not a mistake, for the coaches went right on ahead and stuck him on Jack’s line again.

“Bittle, head’s up!” Jack hollered as the defense came at him.

And, once again, Bittle dropped his stick and dropped to the ice before anyone even touched him.

“…or get into the fetal position at center ice,” Jack muttered.  “That’s also an option.”

If he didn’t get over this checking issue fast, this placement wasn’t going to last.

That week went by slowly.   He spent the mornings going for runs around the lake and finishing the last of the summer reading for his English class.  Afternoons were for hockey, and evenings were, surprisingly, for his social life.

One night, the five of them spent an evening together at Holster’s family’s house, playing video games and eating pizza rolls in Holster’s basement.  Another night, Lardo drove them out to “the best goddamn burrito place north of the border, I swear it,” and they took selfies with the guacamole like that was a normal thing that teenagers did.  Maybe it was; it wasn’t like Jack would know.  Somewhere along the course of that evening he was added to the groupchat. On other nights, they all piled into Jack and Ransom’s tiny dorm room, and Jack was surprisingly okay with this.

And then, quite suddenly, the week was over and classes were upon them.  Morning assembly was tragically alphabetical, and he sat in the very back row between Zhao-comma-Anna and Zunat-comma-Josie, unable to hear most of the headmaster’s welcome speech.

He was pretty pleased to find that Shitty was in his history and English classes, and the one art credit he had complained about having to take ended up putting him at an easel next to Lardo.  Lardo, as it happens, was a fantastic artist.  When they were tasked with the simple introductory task of drawing a self-portrait, she confidently drew something abstract that still managed to look exactly like her.  Witchcraft, clearly.

Jack’s own skills in the fine arts were a little underdeveloped, but he managed a decent approximation of a hockey player in full gear.

“You were supposed to draw yourself,” the teacher commented as she passed him by.

 

At the end of the day, Jack wasn’t sure that his GPA was ever going to matter.  If he did play in the NHL, they certainly weren’t going to care about his command of algebra.  On the other hand, that future no longer felt as solid as it once did.  Maybe in a year’s time he would be filling out college applications and scrambling for something else to do with his life, and his GPA could determine his success or failure.  Thinking about which path he was most likely to take would send him spiraling down an existential rabbit hole, which was far from his favorite pastime.

So he resolved to show up to his classes and just do his goddamn homework and let his grades be what they are.  He was busy at work on that very goddamn homework when he heard something that sounded like a sob come from between the library shelves.

Jack seriously considered whether he had the spoons to deal with the crying reference materials, and then he closed his book and went to comfort the distressed encyclopedia.

The encyclopedia, as it turned out, was actually the fainting baker.

“Bittle,” he said, and Bittle squeaked in alarm, looking up at him with wide, puffy eyes.  “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.  I just have such thin skin.  I shouldn’t even be upset right now, let alone crying in a library, goodness.”

“What happened?  You can tell me.”

“No, really, it’s nothing,” Bittle insisted.  “Thanks for checking up on me, Jack, but don’t let me keep you.  Heaven knows you must be at least as busy as I am.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.”  Jack left him to cry a river, stream, waterway, tributary, brook, canal, watercourse of tears over a thesaurus and went back to his studying.  He of all people could respect a request to have a breakdown without witnesses present.

Now that he was paying attention to it, Bittle did seem like he was struggling a little bit.  His smiles were strained, his tardiness to practice was worsening, and his mistakes during practice seemed to occur more frequently and agitate him more.

And, of course, he still couldn’t take a check.

“Bittle,” he called as the team filed off the ice after a grueling practice.  “Stick around a minute.”

He spun gracefully and skated back out to him.  “What’s up, Jack?”

“You’ve got a problem, this stupid mental block about getting hit.  You need to get over it before the season starts.”

“I…um…” Bitty sighed, looking away.  “I’ll do my best, okay?”

Jack nodded.  “I don’t know what kind of hockey you were playing before, but it’s a physical game.  You should get used to that.”

“None.”

“What?”

“I’ve never played hockey before.”

“Wait, really?  Never?”

Bittle shook his head.  “I mean, I watched a few tutorials on YouTube and tried to follow along when I finally got a stick, but naw.  I’ve never played before.  We don’t really do hockey down in Georgia.”

“Then what are you doing here?”  In this state?  On this team?  On Jack’s line?

Bittle laughed, a nervous edge to it.  “Oh, you know.  Trying something new, seeing new places.  I already knew how to skate, so why not hockey?”

Why not hockey?  This kid didn’t really care about the sport or about doing well in it.

“Is this a game to you?” Jack demanded.

“Yes?  Isn’t it a game to you?  And to everyone?”

“No, of course not!”

“But…hockey is just a game?”

Jack must have been glaring, because Bittle stepped back.  “This isn’t a game, and this isn’t a joke,” Jack hissed, “If you can’t get with the program, you should probably just quit.”  And he skated past Bittle.

His dramatic exit had the wind knocked out of it when he returned to his room to find Bittle sitting on Ransom’s bed with a textbook open on his lap.  Bittle glanced up at him and then quickly found something interesting in his book.  “I didn’t know you and Jack were roommates,” Bitty commented.

“Yeah,” Ransom said.  “Hope you don’t mind, Jack, I’m helping Bitty here with his chemistry homework.”

“Okay, fine.”  Jack tossed his bag at the foot of his bed and shoved his headphones in his ears.

Unfortunately, this quickly became a regular occurrence.  Apparently, science education was also something that they don’t really do in Georgia, and Bittle needed someone to hold his hand through basic chemistry.  Fine, whatever.  The library was closed this late into the evening, and Ransom was the only person Bittle knew who was willing and available to help him.  Great.  And Bittle’s roommate was loud and obnoxious, so they couldn’t work in his room.  Fantastic.

“Thanks, Rans!” Bitty said as he was leaving one night.  “Same time on Thursday?”

“Sure!  Good luck on your quiz tomorrow!”  The door clicked shut behind him.  “Jack.”

Jack removed a headphone.  “What?”

“I don’t wanna be rude, but what’s your problem?”

“My problem?”

“With Bitty,” Ransom clarified.  “You get kinda bitchy whenever he’s around.  What’s up with that?”

“I don’t like him.”

“Why not?  He’s a nice guy.  It’s not because he’s…?”

Jack waited, but Ransom didn’t finish his sentence.  “Because he’s what?”

Ransom sounded frustrated.  “Don’t tell Shitty I said this, because I’m probably saying it wrong, but he seems pretty gay.”

“Oh!  No, definitely not.  That’s not it at all.  I don’t care if he’s gay.  Why would I care if he’s gay?”

“I dunno, man, some people get hung up on it.  Why don’t you like him then?”

“He doesn’t belong on our team.  He doesn’t take it seriously, and he’s going to be a huge liability.  Did you know he’s never played hockey before?”

“No way!  He’s way too good to have never played before!  Can you imagine how good he’s going to be once he has some experience?”

“It won’t matter if he doesn’t take hockey seriously!  And he’s so…fragile.  Tiny.  Terrified of getting hit.  He’s never going to be any kind of serious player if he can’t take a check.”

Ransom shook his head.  “I think you’re selling him short.  And even if you’re not, that’s no reason to be a bastard to him.  He’s having a rough time right now, being so far away from home, in case you didn’t notice.  Having you being all passive aggressive whenever he’s around isn’t helping anybody.”

Jack put his headphone back in.  “Okay, fine.”

Things became uneasy between them after that, and even as Jack painted side-by-side with Lardo and listened to Shitty rant to their teacher about the whitewashing of history, he felt a wall springing up around him.  He kept his head down and his skates sharp and pushed through as best he could.

As their first game loomed on the horizon, Jack admitted to himself that he was failing the hard part of hockey, and he needed a new game plan.

It was an away game, so they piled onto a bus with their gear and anxiety.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”  Jack pointed to the empty seat next to Bittle.

He seemed to force the hesitancy on his face behind a veneer of southern hospitality.  “Of course, hon.”  He turned to look out of the window as Jack sat down next to him.

The bus lurched into motion, and Jack glanced over at Bittle, who was still staring resolutely out the window.  Jack fidgeted a bit, glanced at him again, and said, “Um, Bittle?”

“Hmm?”

“I, um, wanted to apologize.  I haven’t been very nice to you, and you don’t deserve that.”

“Oh.”  Bittle turned to look at him, his expression cautious.  “Thanks, Jack.  I’m sorry I’ve been so…I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted out of a linemate.  I know you’re used to playing with way more experienced hockey players, who probably don’t have a problem getting hit—what am I saying?  They definitely don’t have a problem getting hit, they’re _real_ hockey players.  So I totally get why you’re frustrated with me but I promise I really am doing my best, it’s just been really hard trying to adjust to being in high school and so far away from home and trying to learn a new sport all at once and make friends and I don’t even have an oven in the dorms where I can bake anything—”

“Bittle.”

“What?  Oh, sorry.  I can just prattle on about anything if I’m not paying attention.  I’m just a little chatterbox; I can’t help it.  I’m just a little antsy, y’know, this is my first ever hockey game.  Do you ever get tense before games?  Probably not, I’m sure you—”

“I do,” Jack interrupted again.  “It’s normal to be nervous.  Just focus on playing to your strengths.  Go fast, don’t let them pin you down.  If they can’t catch you, they can’t hit you.  I’ll have your back, let you know if anyone’s on your tail.”

“Okay.”  Bittle smiled.  “Thanks.”

“After this game, though, we’re going to need to work on the checking.  It’s the biggest thing holding you back right now.  The rest will come with time—Ransom’s right, you’ve got some natural talent—but we need to get you past this fear of getting hit.  And I’m going to help you with it.”

“You will?  How?”

“Practice.  How else?  There’s plenty of time when a rink is free, and players can reserve rink time if there’s nothing scheduled.  I’ve been doing it since we started.”

“Why?”

Jack blinked in surprise.  “To practice.”  The ‘of course’ was heavily implied.

“Wow.  You really are serious about hockey.  I can’t imagine wanting to practice more than two hours a day, and that in addition to team workouts.  That’s soooo much hockey.  Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

“Nope.”  He loved it.  He lived and breathed hockey.  On the ice was the one place he felt at home, felt like he had any sort of value.  “I like hockey.”

“You know?  I think I’m starting to like hockey too.”

Jack managed a smile.  “Good.  In that case, Bittle, a word of advice.”

“Yeah?”

“Eat more protein.”


	2. Someone Else Did It

Jack was surprisingly calm in the minutes before their first game.  He had won against much tougher teams than the one before them.  He knew their defense was solid.  Johnson was impenetrable when the plot demanded it.  He had Bittle and Frosty on his line, both of whom he knew how to play off of.

It would be fine.

They lined up for the faceoff.  Jack took a deep breath.  The puck dropped, and the world dropped into place.  Jack was off in a blink, blew past his opponent, fired a pass to Frosty, looped behind the defense, caught the pass and slapped it in glove-side, all within the first fifteen seconds of the game.

And it was fine.

They won easily, and there seemed to be an atmosphere of relief on the bus afterwards.  They had something here that worked, and this win was a good omen for the season to come.

“We’re celebrating the win at Holster’s tonight,” Ransom told him as they got off the bus.  “He’ll pick us up from the dorm in like half an hour.”

“Great.”  This probably wouldn’t be a party he had to worry about.  Holster’s parents would almost certainly be there.

The night was warm and the crickets were loud as they sat together outside their building and waited for Holster.  The sky was clear and the stars were so bright out here in the middle of nowhere.

“Hey y’all,” Bitty said as he joined them.  He had a pie balanced on each hand.

Ransom eyed the pies appreciatively.  “What kind of pies are those?”

“One is apple and the other is chocolate silk.  I figured those would be pretty well-received, but I’ll have to try to figure out what people like if we’re gonna be having a lot of these parties.”

“Oh yeah, you can count on it.  We celebrate every win, and I feel like we’re going to have quite a few of those this year.”

“Don’t count your chickens,” Jack muttered.  “I thought you said you didn’t have access to an oven?”

“Not in the dorms,” Bitty said.  “But there’s one up in the manor house that I don’t think anyone ever uses.  It’s really old, and it took me a while to figure out how to work it, but it’s serviceable.”

“And you’re allowed to use it?”

Bitty shrugged.  “Probably not.  Priorities, though.”

“Pie-orities,” Ransom giggled as Holster’s Chevy pulled into the drive.

“I heard that,” Holster said.  “It’s a fine, and also you can walk your punny ass to my house, Ransy.”

“Be nice, or you’re not getting any of my pie!”

“Get your punny ass in my car and make yourself at home then.  What kind of pie is that?”

Holster drove a little more sedately than Lardo, but Jack would give credit where it was due and commend Lardo for at least keeping her eyes on the road and observing stop signs.  It was nice that he had friends, but they were going to literally kill him.

Would it be any consolation to his parents that someone else did it?

He shooed the bad thought from the front of his mind, but it sullenly planted itself somewhere in the back to wait for a darker time.

There were a few other cars parked in Holster’s driveway and the muted thrum of music in the air.  He led them down into the basement, which was brimming with loud hockey players and louder music.  It smelled like sweat and booze and weed, and Jack almost asked Holster to take him back to campus.  But he didn’t want them to think he was That Guy with a stick up his ass.

“We’re gonna need plates and stuff for the pie,” he shouted to Holster over the music.  “I’ll help you carry them.”

“Aight, come on,” Holster shouted back and led him back up the stairs.  His kitchen was pristine, like his parents had cleaned in preparation for a couple dozen hockey boys drunkenly trashing their basement.  Holster pulled plates down from a cabinet and set them on the counter.  “Actually, maybe paper would be better,” he mused.  “My mom likes these ones, and drunk people drop shit.”

“Are your parents cool with having all this underage drinking going on in their house?”

“Ch’yeah, they don’t care.”

“Oh.  Cool.”

“But if the cops show up, the story is they had no idea we had booze.”

“Right, yeah.”

“Here.”  He shoved a stack of paper plates into Jack’s arms and put a pile of forks on top.  “Take these downstairs; I’mma see if I can find my mom’s pie cutter.  I know we’ve got one somewhere…”

Jack took a deep breath of the clean air in the kitchen and plunged back down into the party.  He delivered the plates to the minibar where Bitty had set the pies, and he figured since Bitty had gone off to dance, he should probably stay there with the pies and make sure nobody knocked them onto the floor.  Yes, this party was in dire need of a pie guard.  Thank God Jack was there to fill this vital role.

“Hey Jack,” Ransom called.  “I dunno where the fuck Holster is, but I need a beer pong partner.  Get over here!”

Jack stayed where he was and gestured halfheartedly to the pies in feeble explanation.  Ransom did not appear to have understood from this his devotion to his crucial task and shouted again, “C’mon man!”

Jack reluctantly left the pies and joined Ransom at one end of a very sticky ping pong table.  “I can’t.  I’ve never played before,” he lied.  “I don’t know how.  You don’t want me as your partner.”

“Here, we’ll teach you.  Lardo will probably even spot us a couple.”

“Sure,” Lardo said from the other end of the table as she bounced a ball expertly off its edge.

“Hey, have you guys had a game yet?” Jack asked her.

“No.  Tuesday night’s the home opener.  Attendance is mandatory.”

“Okay, looking forward to it.  You’re gonna be great.  But really guys, I don’t want to play pong.”

“Okay, that’s fine,” Ransom said.  “HEY BITTY!  Come be my pong partner!”

Jack eagerly went back to keeping the pies company.  When Holster finally came back with the pie server thing, Jack took charge of cutting and distribution.  He even went a little wild and ate a slice of apple.  Technically, he wasn’t on a strict diet anymore, but he usually felt better keeping it anyway.

It would be…an acceptance of something he didn’t want to accept, if he were to stop eating like a player a year out from the NHL.

But Bitty went to all the effort to illicitly bake them these pies; it would be rude to not eat any.  It was only one piece, and this would be the only night he’d feel obligated, because he was _never_ accepting an invitation to a party again.

When his company had been eaten, Jack went and hid in the bathroom for as long as he could without it being weird, and then he stood in a corner and feigned interest in their game for a while.  Lardo was undefeated and didn’t even look tipsy yet.  Witchcraft, clearly.

He was happy to unobtrusively watch her dominate the pong table until it was time to go home, but Shitty materialized out of nowhere when a fastpaced song came on and pulled him away to dance.  Jack was, fortunately and unfortunately, far too sober to be much of a dancer, but Shitty didn’t seem to notice or care.  He was high on life tonight.  And probably also weed.

“When I grow up,” he said in Jack’s ear as they sat down together after Shitty had exhausted himself dancing, “I’m gonna grow a huge mustache.  Like Nietzsche.  It’s gonna be incredible.”

Shitty really didn’t look like he was able to grow much of anything on his face, but Jack nodded solemnly.

“I dunno man, I’ve always wanted one.  I might grow my hair out too.  It’s such a crime, man, it’s horrible that the administration won’t let us have hair past our collars.  Fuck the police and this oppressive crap.  Don’t they know shit about hockey flow?”

“They must not.”

“Well I’m gonna tell them!  Where’s my phone?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said as he discreetly picked up Shitty’s phone and slid it into his pocket so he didn’t call to yell at some poor 911 operator about Samwell’s dress code.  “It might have to wait until morning.”

“Bullshit, brah.  We’ve gotta fight the man tonight while we’re young!”

“You’ll still be sixteen tomorrow Shitty.”

“Yeah, but tomorrow I’m gonna be hungover as fuuuck and I’m not gonna be calling anybody about anything.”

“You’ll still be sixteen the day _after_ tomorrow.”

Shitty winced a bit.  “I might also still be hungover the day after tomorrow.  I’m pretty trashed right now, and I’m not even done yet.”

“No, you’re done,” Jack decided.  “You’ve had enough for tonight.”

Shitty protested, but he leaned his head on Jack’s shoulder and made no move to go get more beer.  Jack flagged down Holster after a while and had him bring Shitty a bottle of water.

“C’mon, you’ll appreciate it in the morning,” Jack coaxed.  “You might even be able to admonish the police for their crimes.”

“That’s too big a word for how shitfaced we are right now,” Shitty grumbled.

“You are shitfaced.  I don’t drink.”

“You’re missing the fuck out, man.”

“Yeah, well I’ll miss the hangover too.  Now drink your water, or I’ll pull you out of bed at ass o’clock in the morning tomorrow to go for a run.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

Shitty drank his water, and then Jack shoved another bottle at him.  Around three in the morning, energy levels throughout the room began to flag, and the volume of the music was lowered.  His teammates gave up the dancing and the pong and sat around on the floor, dozing and chatting.  If they hadn’t also been passing around a joint, he might have joined them.

He went and hid in the bathroom again instead.  Since everybody was pretty out of it by this point, he figured no one would notice if he just stayed in there and played Sudoku for an hour.  So he did.  And when he finally ventured back out to make sure everyone was still alive, he found them asleep on the ground.  His watch flashed 4:34 AM.

He settled into an open space on the floor between where Bitty was curled into a ball like a cat and Ransom was using Holster’s stomach as a pillow.

He was the first one awake in the morning, his body’s internal alarm clock waking him up a few minutes before seven even though he’d only slept a couple hours.  He knew from experience he was incapable of sleeping in any later than that, so he started quietly gathering up discarded pie plates and solo cups by the little square of daylight that was streaming in from the single window near the ceiling.  The pong table and the floor underneath would need a good scrub down, so he left those for Holster to handle, but he took Bitty’s pie plates upstairs and washed them.  As he was setting the second one in the drying rack, a pajama-clad Mr. Birkholtz appeared.

“Good morning,” he said sleepily, heading straight for the coffee pot.  “You’re up early.  You kids have fun last night?”

“Yes,” Jack lied.  “Thank you for having us.”

“Can I get you some breakfast?  I usually make pancakes for the boys when they have sleepovers, but I don’t think they’ll be up for a few more hours.”

“Thanks, but I’m alright.”

“Coffee?  Toast?  Orange juice?  Eggs?  Anything?”

“Maybe some toast, if it’s not too much trouble.  Thanks.”

“Of course.  Now which one are you?”

“Jack.  I’m a forward.”

“What’s your jersey number?”

“One.”

“Oh!”  Mr. Birkholtz’s eyes lit with recognition.  “You’re the one that scored half their goals last night.”

“Yeah, that was me.”

“Good game, Jack.  That was pretty impressive.  You know, I think Adam mentioned you.  He said he was really excited to have you on the team, that you were some kind of big deal hockey prospect.”

“Well, I’m really excited to be on the team with such great guys,” Jack said, dropping a little bit into his press voice.  “I’m not really trying to project what my hockey career will look like after I graduate though.  It’s too early for me to speculate.”

“Are you planning on going to college?  Do you want to go pro?”

“Maybe.  I haven’t decided yet.”

“What made you switch to Samwell?” he asked conversationally as he set a plate of toast in front of him.  “You look too old to be a freshman.  Do you want some jam?”

“Thank you, and yes, please.  Yeah, I’m a junior.  I just needed a change from last year, and Samwell had a great hockey program.  And I say that as a Canadian.”

“Where in Canada are you from?”

“Montreal.”

“So, the Habs then?”

“Yeah.

“Who’s your favorite player?”

Jack gave his canned press laugh and his usual answer: “Well, that’d have to be my dad.”

“Your dad played for the Habs?  What’s his name?”

“Bob Zimmermann.”

Mr. Birkholtz almost dropped the coffee pot.  “You’re _Bad Bob Zimmermann’s_ kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.  I guess that explains why you were skating circles around everyone else last night.”

 _It doesn’t_ , Jack doesn’t say.  He worked hard to play at the level he does.  His father wasn’t the one who dragged his ass out of bed for conditioning before the sun was up for so many years he couldn’t sleep in like a normal human being if he tried.  He wasn’t the one who found a rink to practice on during his off days, skating until he felt steadier on skates than he did on his own two feet.  He wasn’t the one who had carefully logged the amount of protein and number of calories in his diet daily since he was fucking eleven, and had to spend a solid five minutes justifying it to himself before he cut himself a slice of apple pie.

Sure, Bad Bob probably did all those things in his day.  But this was Jack’s day, and hockey skills weren’t fucking genetic.  His slapshot wasn’t a heritable trait.  He built this house with his own two fucking hands.  It might be shaky, with anxiety in the supports and skeletons in the closets and Kent Parson’s name graffitied on the bedroom walls, but it’s his own fucking achievement.

“Haha, yeah,” Jack does say, because Mr. Birkholtz just let him sleep in his basement and kindly made him some toast, and he may be a sullen, angsty teenager but he had some fucking manners.

He talked school and hockey and their chances for the season with Mr. Birkholtz for a while, and then he lended a hand in making a mountain of chocolate chip pancakes for the team.  They began to groggily drift up the stairs one by one, starting with Bitty, who perked up considerably at the sight of the pancakes.

Bitty took over the polite chatter, relieving Jack to go back downstairs and scrape Shitty off the floor.

“Fuck off,” Shitty mumbled, his arms thrown over his head.

“There are pancakes,” Jack cajoled.  “And you’ll feel better faster if you drink something.”

“I’ll puke all over Holster’s kitchen if I put anything in my mouth.”

“It’s okay; Holster’s already got a ton of cleaning to do.  I think you guys spilled more beer than you drank last night.”

“Ha, last night was lit!  Ow.”  Shitty winced at his own declaration.

“I’m a little bit worried that before I joined you threw these parties without a designated sober person.  You know that’s not safe.”

“Chillax.  Nobody’s gotten hurt.  And Holster’s parents are always upstairs anyway.”

“Holster’s parents aren’t going to know if someone’s gotten alcohol poisoning from upstairs.”

“The beer’s not that strong,” Shitty protested.

“Inexperienced kids don’t know their limits.  It happens all the time.  Designate a sober person.  You can take turns.”

“Wait, why would we need to take turns if you don’t drink?  Can’t you always be the sober person?”

“I’m not really a partying type of guy,” Jack explained.  He was never showing up to another one of these.  “I probably won’t be at all of the team’s parties.”

Shitty looked like he was about to protest, but Jack continued, “I’m serious.  You were really far gone last night, Shitty.  I cut you off, but if I hadn’t done it, no one else there was going to.  I don’t think anyone would have noticed you’d had too much until you passed out, and maybe not even then.  Don’t be an idiot.”  There was a harsh edge to Jack’s voice by the end of his lecture.

Shitty buried his face back in his arms.  “You’re a real buzzkill, ya know?  A good friend, and a responsible adult, but a giant fucking buzzkill.”

Jack grimaced.  “I’m aware.”

“Thanks for looking out for me, man.  I appreciate it.”

“That’s what teammates are for.”

Shitty peaked out from under his arm and gave Jack a curious look.  “That’s what _friends_ are for, you mean?”

“Yeah, friends,” Jack agreed, tugging Shitty upright despite his complaints.  “Now c’mon, before Holster eats all of the pancakes.  That guy is a goddamn garbage disposal.”

By the time he got back to the dorm, it was almost two in the afternoon.  Saturday wasn’t typically his rest day, but he mentally switched around his workout schedule to give himself the day off.  He took a shower and took a nap, and then buckled down and got his homework out of the way.  There wasn’t a lot of time to study during the week between practice and his newfound social life, so study marathons might become a regular thing on Saturdays when he didn’t have a game.

His phone buzzed, and he opened it to see a conversation in progress on the team’s groupchat.

 

 **Bugs** : hey everybody, we’re meeting tomorrow afternoon in the lobby of the ice arena to make posters for the girls home opener

 **Bugs** : I’ve got blank posters and some markers, but itd be great if some other people could bring more supplies

 **Frosty** : I have some sharpies I could bring

 **Goose** : what time tomorrow afternoon

 **Bugs** : **@Goose** 1pm

 **Shitty** : lemme see if Lardo’s got anything I could borrow

 **Dandy** : I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it

 **Dandy** : sorry

 **Bugs** : That’s okay, we’ll make an extra

 **Ransom** : Literally all I have is pencils

 **Smiley** : I can bring my sister’s stencil letters and I also have some glue if we need it

 **Dandy** : **@Bugs** thanks

 **Jack** : I can print out their roster so we have their numbers

 **Bugs** : **@Jack** great, thanks

 **Darcy** : hey **@Jack** why don’t you have a nickname yet

 **Darcy** : if I have to suffer through this girly ass nickname you shouldn’t be allowed to go by **@Jack**

 **Goose** : hey its not jacks fault your name is jamie austen. the literary reference was right there

 **Smiley** : **@Darcy** youre right, he needs a nickname.  Thoughts?

 **Goose** : jackpot

 **Bugs** : jack in the box

 **Darcy** : invader zim

 **Shitty** : **@Darcy** that’s fucking hilarious, but it’s too long

 **Goose** : bad jack

 **Bugs** : that sounds dumb

 **Goose** : so does bad bob, but it worked

 **Bugs** : **@Jack** do you have an opinion?

 

Jack looked at the screen, considering.

 

 **Bugs** : what did your old team call you

 

That was a hard no.  He had no desire to ever be called Zimms again, despite it being a better nickname than anything they had come up with.

 

 **Jack** : they called me jack

 **Shitty** : that’s boring

 **Bitty** : hey y’all, I have some glitter pens I can bring.  And how about Jay-Z?

 **Darcy** : omfg that’s brilliant **@Bitty**

 **Goose** : agreed

 **Bugs** : by the power vested in me I now pronounce you Jay-Z. please don’t cheat on the bride

 **Jack** : ???

 **Bitty** : oh boy, we’re gonna need to fix that ??? asap **@Jack**

 

Jack, being the savvy researcher that he was, googled Jay-Z.  After deciding that he was willing to bear his name, he went back to his homework.

 

Samwell Women’s Hockey was a small team made up mostly of small, fast girls.  They only had one or two who were over 5’8” and everyone else had to rely on their speed.  Since checking wasn’t allowed in girls’ hockey, the game went a little differently, and Jack found the differences fascinating.

He had never really watched much women’s hockey, and looking back he wasn’t sure why that was.  These girls were good: clever, agile, and aggressive in a way that didn’t involve smearing their opponents against the glass.  They played kind of similar to how Bitty played.  Lardo was a blur as she shot down the ice on a breakaway, and Jack shouted himself hoarse when she scored.  By the time they managed to squeak in a win in overtime, he had waved his glittery sign above his head until he looked like he suffered from a severe case of glittery dandruff.

After the game, they milled around in the lobby and waited for the girls to come out of the locker room.  As girls do, they arrived in one big clump, glowing with sweat and smiles.

“Alright, ducklings to the front!” Lardo commanded.  “It’s time for introductions.”  She pointed to each girl as she introduced her.  “March and April here are our newest defensewomen and, as you’ve probably noticed, twins.”  The girls looked completely identical to Jack, and he resigned himself to having to guess which one was which.  “Millie was the one who scored our second goal.”  A very pretty blonde girl waved in acknowledgement.  “And Rapunzel is our new backup goalie.  You didn’t get to see her in action today, but she’s been killing it in practice.”  It was clear why the girl was nicknamed Rapunzel—her hair fell in a dark, shiny sheet past her waist.  She gave them a shy smile.  “Now bring forth your frogs.”

As Johnson introduced their three freshmen and Bitty tried to charm their skates off, Jack saw Lardo discreetly loop an arm around Rapunzel’s waist and whisper something to her that caused the younger girl to grin and throw an arm around her shoulders.

“Now unfortunately, we can’t throw a party on a Tuesday,” Lardo said, still hanging on to Rapunzel.  “But we are all going to carpool out to get ice cream.  If you have a car, please offer a ride to those who don’t.  If you don’t, please don’t make a mess in someone else’s car.”

Jack could do ice cream.  Ice cream was better than a party any day, even if there was a 110% chance that he was only going to get a fruit pop or something that wasn’t going to screw his diet.  As he slid into the backseat of Holster’s Chevy, he thought that this season might actually turn out to be kinda fun.


	3. A Little Piece of Home

Goose squinted at him as he sagged against the doorframe.  “What the everloving _fuck_ , Zimmermann?”

“Sorry to wake you,” Jack greeted him.  “I’m here to collect Bittle.”

“He’s asleep.  _I_ was fucking asleep.  It’s four in the fucking morning, you fucking freak,” Goose whined.

“Well, look at it this way,” Jack said.  “The sooner you wake him up, the sooner we leave and you can go back to sleep.”

“Fuck you,” he mumbled sleepily as he went to shake Bitty awake and then collapsed onto his bed.

Bitty sat up, rubbing his eyes and then blinking in confusion.  His hair stuck up at odd angles, and he had a stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm.  “Jack?”

“Hey, get dressed.  We only have the ice until seven, so don’t dawdle.”

Bitty stared at him, bewildered and unmoving.  “What?”

“Checking practice.  Come on, we’re burning daylight.”

Bitty slowly turned to look out his window, then back to Jack.  “What daylight?”

“Well, metaphorical daylight.  Do you want to stop fainting on the ice or not?”

Goose groaned.  “Just get the fuck out, Bittle, before I throw the both of you out the goddamn window.”

Bitty visibly contemplated whether to endure Jack’s attempt to help before reluctantly parting with his bed.  He dragged himself into some workout clothes by the light of his phone and still didn’t seem entirely awake as they left the dorm.

“Did your friend want to come to practice with us?” Jack chirped gently.

“Huh?  Wha—?”  Bitty glanced around and then, finally, down to the rabbit still unconsciously clutched to his chest.  “Oh.”

“Do you want to take it back?”

“Him,” Bitty corrected.  “And no, Goose will tease me about it if he sees me.”  He looked sadly down at his rabbit and fixed an ear that had bent the wrong way.

“Has he been giving you grief about it?  Er, him?”

“A little.”  Bitty was frowning.

Goose lowered considerably in Jack’s esteem.  “Eh, I’m sorry about that.”

Bitty shrugged.  “It’s fine.  What fifteen-year-old guy has a stuffed rabbit anyway?”

“I don’t know about rabbits,” Jack said, “But an old teammate of mine had a stuffed kitten that he brought to away games and stuff.  It’s not weird.”  It was, in fact, a little adorable.

“Oh.”  Bitty turned over the rabbit in his hands.  “I just wanted to bring a little piece of home with me, y’know?  This is my first time living on my own.”

In the dark parking lot of the ice arena, Bitty did look terribly small and out of place.  “I get it,” Jack said as he led him around to the side door, which Jack had borrowed a key to.  They stumbled around in the dark for a moment while trying to find the light switch, and then they were blinded by the sudden sharp brightness.

 _Ugh, rhodopsin_ , Jack thought at the burning pain in his eyes.  Apparently, he was already starting to pick up some of his roommate’s idiosyncracies.

Bittle geared up, but Jack opted to forgo everything but his skates—no need to loom over Bitty too much.  Jack pressed him as little as possible, trying to keep the smaller boy from shutting down.  He had given this some thought, and he focused first on evasion tactics, moves that took advantage of Bittle’s quickness to get out of tight situations.  After Bitty had drilled these a few times, he introduced a puck and had Bitty practiced his duck and flee while keeping control of it.  This took them on an unexpected detour into puck handling, which was just as well, really, it wasn’t like Bitty wasn’t going to need to learn that anyway,

There were no windows overlooking the rink, so if the sun rose that morning, neither had any indication.  They only knew it was time to call it quits when Bitty’s alarm started buzzing.

“Good work today, Bittle,” Jack said, stepping off the ice.  “We should do this again sometime.”  Especially since they hadn’t gotten to the part that involved actually taking checks.

“Oh Lord,” Bitty groaned.  “I can’t do this every day, Jack!  I need sleep!”

“That’s okay, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to book the ice every day anyway.”  Bitty sat in the bottom row of the bleachers and began shucking his gear.  Jack noticed that the kid was pouring sweat.  “Maybe we’ll take it easy while it’s still the preseason,” he amended.

Bitty sighed.  “Why do I feel like your idea of easy and my idea of easy don’t look all that much alike?”

“Sorry, was this too much for you?”

“No!” Bitty said defensively, then relented: “A little.  I’m going to be falling asleep during my classes and practice today.  Next time, could you give a kid a little warning so he knows not to stay up ’til one in the morning watching videos of baby sloths?”

Was that a thing normal teenagers did?  Jack may never know.

“Sure.  I’ll tell you the next time I can get the ice.  It’s hard to get better hours, though.  A lot of local teams practice here, and then there are skating lessons a few times a week.”

“Like figure skating?”

“Yeah.”

Bitty perked up.  “I’m a figure skater!  I wonder if they need any help…”

“Oh, really?”  Jack didn’t find this particularly surprising.  It explained why he was so fast and graceful on the ice without any prior hockey experience.  “What made you switch to hockey?”

Bitty’s smile faltered.  “Oh, I guess it just got too impractical to keep training.  Besides, my Mama says it’s good to always be tryin’ new things.”

Jack shrugged.  He didn’t see a whole lot of purpose in giving up something he liked and was good at just for a change of pace, but he supposed he wasn’t exactly a normal teenager, so what did he know?

“Have you ever done anything besides play hockey?” Bitty asked.

Jack shook his head.  “Not really.”

Bitty looked suddenly contemplative, which Jack didn’t know to take as a warning sign.

 

* * *

 

A loud knock on the door was not quite enough to wake Jack up fully.  The lights were still on, so Ransom must still be awake.  He would handle it.

A much closer and much louder “Jaaaaaaaack!” was enough to get him to open his eyes and squint up at a familiar figure haloed in warm flourescent light.

“Bits?  What time is it?”

“It’s ten ‘til midnight,” Bitty said.  “C’mon, get up.  It’s time I returned the favor!”

“What favor?  Waking you up too early?”

“Well, that too, although I actually thought you’d still be awake.  But mostly I’m going to teach you how to make an apple pie.”

“An apple pie,” Jack repeated.

“Yes!”

“At midnight?”

“Of course!  When else do you think we can sneak into the kitchen?”

Jack stared at him dumbly for a moment and then laughed quietly.  Over at his desk, Ransom watched them with quiet amusement.  This was ridiculous.

“Okay,” Jack gave in with a sigh even he thought was overly dramatic.  “Give me two minutes to put some pants on.”

“Better hurry, Mr. Zimmermann.  Pie waits for no pants.”

Jack grumbled internally all the way up the grassy incline that led to the manor.  Late at night, the lights were off on the ground floor, but a couple of the higher windows were lit.  A few people still lived in the manor, a mixed group consisting of the headmaster, two teachers who were visiting this semester (which was apparently a thing that happened in prep schools?), and a couple of the groundskeepers.  The kitchen that served the cafeteria was in a separate building and the only one that saw daily use during the schoolyear.  The original kitchen was a picture of neglect and obsolescence, but, according to Bitty, still functional.

The moon was bright, and they walked in the shadows of the trees that cosied up to the manor.  Bitty had a backpack stuffed with baking supplies, to supplement the flour and sugar he had hidden in the abandoned kitchen.  They crept quietly around to the kitchen window, which Bitty slid open with practiced ease, and they clambered awkwardly through.

“Okay,” Jack said, squinting in the darkness.  “How do you make an apple pie?”

“Wait a sec,” Bitty said, digging around in his backpack.  “Let’s get the oven lit first.”  A couple moments later, he struck an explicitly-forbidden-in-the-dorms-or-anywhere-on-campus-for-that-matter match.  “Aren’t wood-burning ovens neat?”

Jack shrugged, and realized belatedly that Bitty probably couldn’t see it.

Bitty did the thing that turned his phone into a flashlight, then started pulling things out of his bag and setting them on the counter.  “There are very few hard-and-fast rules about pie baking,” he told Jack seriously.  “And there’s plenty of room for experimentation.  So anything I tell you tonight can probably be tweaked if you want to try something different, but this is my Mama’s recipe and it doesn’t really need much tweaking, in my humble opinion.”

Jack was given the task of peeling and cutting up apples (six medium gala, one granny smith, and one pink lady) while Bitty opened unto him the holy scriptures of pie making.  And he was amazed and frightened by his words because, honestly, the amount of sugar this little Southern boy was describing was truly fearful.  Jack timidly put forth the suggestion that they tweak it to be a little less sugary so he could eat it without feeling like he had sinned against his former nutritionist, and Bitty, to his surprise, obliged without protest.

After they had finished the lattice—which Jack had to admit was extremely satisfying in an entirely unfamiliar way—and put the pie in to bake, Bitty’s baking lecture came to an awkward halt.

“And now we wait?”

“And now we wait.”

“So…how’s your chemistry been going?”

“Fine, I guess.  Your classes going well?”

“Yeah, they’re fine.”

“Good.”

“Yep.”

Jack waited for the conversation to get up from where it had fallen on the ground, but as the seconds stretched by, he began to fear it had given up and died.  He frantically tried to rehabilitate it.

“So…you said you were from Georgia?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s Georgia like?”

“Pretty hot, especially in the summer.  It’s…well, it’s Georgia.”

Jack wasn’t quite familiar enough with American stereotypes to derive much meaning from that statement, but he knew that Georgia was pretty close to Florida, and he had heard about Florida.

“And you’re from Canada?” Bitty asked.

“Yes.  I’m from Montreal.”

“Do you speak French then?”

“Oui.”

“Cool.  I’m just starting to learn French this semester.  Maybe if I’m really terrible at it, you could…well.”

“Sure.”  He already did about half his homework in Jack’s room anyway.

“Oh!  Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The conversation started to look a little faint again.

“What kind of books do you like?”

Bitty shrugged.  “I don’t really read that much.”

“Oh.  Haha, me neither.  Music, then?”

“Oh!” Bitty said excitedly.  “I’m a big fan of Beyonce.”

“Cool,” Jack said.  “Who’s that?”

Jack didn’t need to contribute anything else to the conversation for the rest of the time the pie was baking.

 

* * *

 

“You look tired,” Shitty remarked sleepily as Jack slid into the chair next to his in English class.

Jack quirked an eyebrow.  “You’re one to talk.”  Shitty was currently using his arms as a pillow.

“Yeah, but I routinely make poor life choices.  Ransom says you’re usually in bed by the time the sun goes down, you responsible freak.”

“Well, I was up a bit later last night.  That’s not that weird.”

“It is when it’s you we’re talking about,” Shitty insisted.  “You need to chill more often, bro.  Live life in the moment, don’t worry so much.  Breathe, and all that stuff.”

“I do,” Jack argued, even if only the last point was really true.

“Sure.  What were you doing up so late?  Homework?  Hockey strategy?  A bit of elective educational reading for the edification of the mind?”

“I was baking a pie, actually.”

Shitty chuckled.

“No, really.  Bitty decided he needed to get me back for waking him up for morning checking practice, so he kept me up late to teach me how to bake a pie.”

Shitty continued laughing, but it seemed like he believed him.  “Did he really?  That’s fan-fucking-tastic.  Good for Bits.”

“Language,” their teacher said sternly as she entered the room.  “I should write you up for that.”

“Sorry,” Shitty said, although he didn’t look even remotely sorry.

“Remind me what your name is,” she said.

“Knight.”

“Do you have a first name, Mr. Knight?”

“No, just Knight.”

That earned him a glare, and she actually took the time to pull up her class roster to check.  What she read there seemed to surprise her.  “You’re just listed in the roster as B. Knight?  Why is that?”

“Because that’s my name,” Shitty said, and Jack noticed his eyes had narrowed in irritation.

“And B. is short for…?”

“Nothing.  That’s my name.”

She let it drop after that, but Jack could feel Shitty stewing in resentment beside him.  When the period finally ended, Jack followed him into the hallway and asked him quietly, “What was her problem?”

“I don’t fucking know, dude.  I don’t get why people always have to make a big deal about my name.”

“Why do you dislike Beauregard so much?  Is there some prominent racist or something that had that name?”

Shitty huffed.  “Probably, but that’s not actually my name.  It’s a running joke.  The guys know my initial is B, so they keep making up ridiculous things it could be.  My favorites so far are Baal, Bacchus, and Beelzebub, because they’d piss off my dad the most.”

“Oh.”  Jack was pretty sure that first names were a thing most normal teenagers had, but again, he wasn’t an expert.

“It’s funny, and I don’t mind it, but my name is Shitty, because my actual name is really shitty, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“I hear you, Shitty.  But you wouldn’t mind if I were to address you as, say, Beowulf or Betelgeuse?”

“…You’re such a fucking nerd, Jack, do you know that?”

“Then what does it say about you that you understood those references?”

“You shut your beautiful face and give me a hug.”


	4. How The Light Struck Them

For a very short couple of days, Jack had humored his therapist and tried the art therapy he’d suggested.  It had been a short-lived experiment for the same reason Jack was now glaring at the smudged drawing in front of him, a headache beginning to form behind his eyes.

It just didn’t look right somehow, and Jack couldn’t put his finger on where he’d gone wrong.

And it was driving him nuts.

The frustration was amplified by glancing over at what Lardo was sketching beside him, which bore a far greater resemblance to their subject than his drawing did.  The subject in question was a collection of junk that their teacher had piled into the shape of a dog.  He had gotten the detail on most of the odds and ends, but had entirely failed to capture the dog-ness.

He looked between the junk-dog and his not-dog in quiet despair for a moment before giving in.  “How are you doing that?” he whispered.

“Hmm?” Lardo didn’t look up.

“How do you draw so well?”

“How do you skate so well?” she asked back.  And the answer didn’t need to be said aloud.

Jack sighed.  “Any tips on how to salvage this?”

Lardo spared a glance at his work.  “You’re doing it right.  Keep going.  Or start over if you feel like you need to.”

Jack reluctantly pulled out another sheet of paper.  “How long did it take you to get this good?”

Lardo chuckled.  “A long-ass time.  I’ve been drawing since before I could read.”  She kicked a foot against her bag under the table, and Jack noticed a sketchbook peeking out the top.  It was baby blue with a pattern of yellow rubber ducks on the cover.  “That’s Sketchbook #19.  It looks a lot different from Sketchbook #1.  Which I burned, by the way.  It could’ve become some awful blackmail material.”

Jack started with the dog this time rather than the junk.  “I’m on sketchbook number zero.  I guess that explains why this looks like trash.”

“It’s supposed to look like trash,” she pointed out.

“It doesn’t look like the _right_ trash though.  When do you get to the point where you can make the picture on the page look like the picture in your mind?  Sketchbook #8?  Sketchbook #10?”

“If I ever find out,” Lardo said, signing her name at the bottom of her work with a practiced flourish, “I’ll let you know.”  She got up to hand in her work and Jack frowned as he erased a bit of his.

“One more thing,” Lardo said as she collected her things.  “This medium’s not for everybody.  You could sculpt, or paint, or take photos, or do digital art.  Don’t give up on art just because you find drawing from life to be a pain.”  She patted his shoulder as she shuffled past him on her way out the door.

Any of those other options sounded more appealing.  If only he could just take a picture of this damned dog and hand that in, it’d save him an hour and a great deal of his eraser.

Jack ruminated on that thought while he drew, eventually taking out his phone and snapping a picture.  He was dismayed to find that the photo somehow didn’t look quite right either—the lighting was weird, casting unwanted shadows; the dog was crooked in the frame; another student was moving in the background; the resolution was poor.

Art was frustrating.

Afterwards, as he walked around campus, Jack noticed the same things he saw every day—a fountain, an archway, flowers, trees, birds—but also took note of their lines and angles, how the light struck them, how his perspective affected what he saw and what his mind had to extrapolate.  On a whim, he took a few photos with his smartphone.  He saved them all, even the bad ones, as _Album #1_.

Jack soon made a habit of capturing images of the world around him.  He wasn’t the kind of teenager who took pictures of his food—was that even a thing that normal teenagers did?—but he found no shortage of photo-worthy sights on campus.  The leaves had just begun to change, and Samwell Academy was a sight to behold in the quiet of the early morning before any of the day students had arrived.

The newly risen sun glinted blindingly off the lake as Jack passed it on his morning run, and although he was unaccustomed to entertaining such overtly romantic thoughts, he couldn’t help but think that it was beautiful.

“Wow, that’s bright,” said an unexpected voice behind him.

Jack startled and looked around to see one of Lardo’s ducklings jogging after him.  She was the one who was currently leading them in assists—Millie Collins, if he remembered correctly.  He pulled his earbuds out and fell into step with her.

“It’s nice out here,” he agreed.  “Do you run here often?”

“Yeah,” she said breathlessly, slowing her pace to match his.  “Every day, but usually in the afternoons.  My friend is on the cross-country team, and they don’t mind if I join in on their practices.  They have a race today though, so I’m on my own.”

“Oh?  How’s their team?”

“They’re great!  Most of the varsity are seniors, so it’s going to be a big year.  They’re undefeated so far.  My friend keeps trying to get me to jump ship from hockey to cross country, but I don’t think that’ll happen.”

“You could do both?”

Millie laughed.  “That’s what she told me!  But no, I think two sports is enough.”

“What else do you play?”

“Tennis.  I’ve been playing since I was a kid, and it’s a lot of fun.  Oh, and I’ll probably run track in the spring, depending on how late our season goes.  How about you?”

“Just hockey,” Jack said.  “I don’t know how you have time for all that _and_ school.”

“It is a bit of a scheduling miracle that I can do two at once,” she admitted.  “Worth it though.”

Jack glanced over at the younger girl.  The sun gleamed golden off her hair and made her a bit difficult to look at, but he could see she was in formidable shape.  Even though she was several inches shorter than him, she kept up without much effort.

“Pretty impressive.”

“Thanks!” Her smile was as blinding as her hair.  But then it turned thoughtful as she looked Jack up and down appraisingly.  “How long have you been out here?”

“Twenty minutes?”

She nodded.  “About the same.  Want to race to the end of the trail?  Or are you the type of guy who’d get pissy if a girl beat him in a race?”

Jack was notorious for getting pissy when he lost, but he didn’t think it was a gender-specific thing.  “Sure, why not?”

They finished their circuit of the lake at a sprint, ducking overhanging branches as they blew through a very alarmed flock of birds and splashed uncaringly through sunlit puddles.  Jack managed to win by a few feet, but immediately forfeited any accompanying glory by doubling over with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath.

“Not bad,” Millie panted.  Her face glistened with sweat, making her officially the shiniest person Jack had ever seen.  “We’ll have to do that again sometime.”

Jack forced himself upright and nodded vigorously.  It had been unexpectedly exhilarating, letting himself run with abandon, racing against a fast opponent with no puck to keep track of, no stakes and no goal.  His legs were splattered with mud up past his knees, and the scent of sweat hung thick on them both, and he felt alive without any trace of the fear that crept after him like a devoted stalker on the ice.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Definitely, let’s do that again.”

They parted ways in the stairwell of the dorms, and by the time Jack had washed off all the mud and sweat, he found his phone full of unread messages.

 

**Shitty** : To the guilty party (you know what you did): you had no goddamn right. I expect an apology to be offered in the next 24 hours, or I’ll make sure your ass gets kicked off this team

**Frosty** : what happened?

**Bugs** : are u okay **@Shitty**

**Shitty** : **@Frosty** if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then don’t worry about it, and just read it as a general reminder not to be a dick

**Shitty** : **@Bugs** I’m fucking pissed off, thanks for the concern

**Beans** : could you like give us some details

**Dandy** : seriously tho what happened

**Shitty** : somebody on this team has made a threat of a sensitive nature against another member of this team, who will go unnamed because he wishes to maintain his anonymity. If you did, I know who you are, and the clock is fucking ticking

**Frosty** : if you know who did it, why send this to the team chat?

**Shitty** : I have reason to think there was more than one person involved, and I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that I’ll drag them to hell if something like this happens again

 

Multiple people were typing, so Jack silenced his phone and left for his first class.

Shitty was, predictably, fuming when Jack saw him in English.  He glared at Jack as he sat down next to him.

“Did you see the group chat this morning?” Shitty demanded in a harsh whisper.

Jack nodded.  “Who’s involved?”

“You tell me.”

Jack was sure his face expressed nothing but surprise and confusion, and that was thankfully what Shitty read there.  “Sorry, brah.  I don’t actually know who did it, so everybody’s a suspect.”

“Can you tell me what happened?” Jack asked.

Shitty shook his head.  “All I can say is that one of our teammates received a letter threatening some pretty horrific and…explicit…violence if he didn’t quit the team.  He doesn’t want his name attached to the inquisition, and the…nature of the threat contained some potentially identifying information.”

“Did he report it to the school?  The coaches?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t say.  But I can say that this wasn’t the first time it’s happened to him, and that’s really fucked up, because until yesterday I had no fucking clue.” Shitty dragged a hand through his hair in agitation.  “I fucking hate…ugh.  Republicans, I guess.”

“Republicans?  Was this a political thing?”  Jack only had a rudimentary understanding of American politics and little desire to look any closer.

“Everything’s political, brah.  Sometimes just existing is political.”

Jack didn’t entirely understand what he meant by that, but before he could ask, their teacher began her lesson and he was left to wonder.

He was still wondering an hour later as he sat in a quiet corner of the library and worked his way through the second act of _King Lear_.  He was distracted from his wondering, though, by a quiet sob from the next aisle over.

“You okay, Bittle?” he whispered.

He heard a hitched breath, and then a few books were pulled out of place to reveal the tear-streaked freshman peering through the bookshelf.  “Hey, Jack.”

“Hey.  What’s wrong?”

“Oh,” Bitty sniffed, anxiously wiping away tears.  “Nothing really.  I just…stress.”

“School stress or hockey stress?”

“Just…life stress.”

Jack frowned, setting _King Lear_ aside.  “It’s not the thing Shitty’s been going on about, is it?”

Bitty’s eyes widened, and though he shook his head in denial, something in Jack’s gut didn’t believe him.

“That’s really messed up, isn’t it?  I hope whoever’s been harassing our teammate gets expelled.  You can’t just do that!”

“Huh. Yeah.”

“Do you have any idea who it might be?”

Bitty waited a moment too long before saying, “No, ’fraid not.  D’you?”

“No,” Jack admitted.  “But I have a pretty good idea of who it’s not.”

“Who’s that?”

Jack looked pointedly at him, and a small smile crept to Bitty’s face.

“I suspect that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, you are a man more sinned against than sinning,” Jack explained.

“Thanks, I think.”

“It’s true,” Jack insisted.  “You’re far too nice to do something so cruel.”

“Merci beaucoup, Jack.”

“Very good, Bittle.  Is French class treating you well?”

“It’s been doing me dirty, not gonna lie to you.  I can’t spell anything.  Why are there so many extra letters?”

“Obviously they’re there to make new French speakers struggle,” Jack said seriously.

Bitty snorted. “No doubt so all you native French speakers can feel superior to the rest of us mortals.”

“Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.”

“Shakespeare again?” Jack grinned.  “We’re reading Macbeth right now, and it just bores me to tears.”

“Ah, so a boring reading assignment is what you mean by ‘life stress’ then?” Jack inquired, gesturing vaguely to their present situation.

“Ha, if only,” Bitty bit out bitterly.

“Why are you really upset then?”

Bitty sighed and looked at him with big, sad eyes, and Jack felt instantly guilty for pushing him.  “Are you my friend, Jack?”

The question caught him off guard.  He had certainly considered him a friend.  He would never have suffered through illicit midnight pie making for anyone he didn’t consider a friend.

“Of course we’re friends, Bitty.  You can tell me what’s wrong.”

Bitty closed his eyes and nodded once.  “Okay.”  He took a deep breath, and Jack was alarmed to hear the edge of a sob in it.  “I’m—I lost Señor Bun.”

That wasn’t what Jack had expected to hear, and he suspected that it wasn’t what Bitty had planned to say.  “I’m sorry.  Do you want some help looking for him?”

He shook his head.  “I tore the whole room upside down and I couldn’t find him.  I leave him sitting in the same place on my pillow every day, but when I came back yesterday he was gone and the note was there instead.”

“What note?”

Bitty’s shoulders drooped.  “I’m sorry,” he said to the floor.  “I lied earlier; it was me Shitty was talking about.  Whoever wants me off the team kidnapped Señor Bun.”

“I’m so sorry.  Whoever did that is not worth the dust which the wind blows in their face.”

That surprised a chuckle out of Bitty.  “Do you have a Shakespeare quote for everything?”

“Not yet.”  Jack hesitated.  “Bitty?”

“Yeah?”

“Shitty mentioned…um…that they threatened to hurt you.  If you don’t feel safe, I can walk you to your classes and practices and…stuff,” he offered.

Bitty nodded.  “Thank you so much.  I’d really appreciate that.”

Jack ducked around the bookshelf between them and offered Bitty a hand up.  He was almost worryingly light.  “You really do need to eat more protein.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“I’m serious.  You weigh like thirty pounds.”

“What!?” Bitty spluttered.  “You’re being ridiculous.”

Jack shrugged.  “Full disclosure, I don’t actually know how the Imperial system works, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.  It’s stupid and you ridiculous Americans should switch to metric like the rest of the world.”

“All y’all Canadians think you’re so much better than us with your metric system and maple syrup and universal health care and _French_ , but at least we never put our milk in _bags_.”  Bitty said it like it was the height of profanity.

“The worst thing you can say about Canada is that we have awful neighbors,” Jack chirped.

Bitty gasped and pressed a hand to his heart.  It gave the impression that if he’d been wearing pearls, he’d have been clutching them.  “Excuuuuuse me, Mr. Zimmermann!  What was that you just said?”

“You heard me.”

“Why I never!  I mean, you’re right, but you shouldn’t _say_ it!”  Bitty shook his head despairingly at Jack and started shoving his notebooks into his backpack.  As Jack watched him do this, he noticed that his face ached.  This observation led to the realization that he was grinning at Bitty like an idiot.

“What class have you got next?” Jack asked, pulling a neutral expression on with practiced ease.

“Ugh, chemistry.”

Jack didn’t have any particularly warm feelings towards the subject either.  To be fair, he remembered very little of what he’d learned in school that year, but he thought he’d disliked chemistry.  “How’s that been going?  Has studying with Ransom helped at all?”

Bitty pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes.  “Bless him, Ransom’s the only reason I’m even kind of passing that class.  I have a quiz today and I’m going to _die_.”

Jack made a sympathetic noise.  “Well, I can make sure you don’t die on your way to class.  Beyond that though, you’re on your own.”

“Thanks a million, Jack,” Bitty said sourly.

After Bitty was delivered safely to his impending academic doom, Jack wandered off to his Algebra II class.  Against his wishes, his mind kept wandering after he sat down by himself in the back.  This was his second attempt at Algebra II, and it demanded much less attention than it had last year.

It was darkly funny, in retrospect, that he had actually thought he would pass any of his classes last year.  He hadn’t exactly been a model student, and he certainly hadn’t spent his evenings doing his math homework.  He had spent his good evenings on ice rinks and his bad evenings tucked away in an unpleasant corner of his mind and his worst evenings tucked into Kenny’s bed a thousand leagues from sober.

It was also darkly funny that Jack still called him Kenny in the privacy of his mind.  It had been a nickname only he was allowed to use, and from Jack’s lips it had been an endearment.

The time for endearments was definitively, mercifully over.

It was darkly unfunny that a treacherous part of Jack still missed it.


	5. The Peculiar Goalie Habitat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all your wonderful comments and for your patience waiting for this chapter. I've been studying for my MCAT and applying to med school for the last several months, and so I'm a coral reef of stress with very little time to write. I have most of the next chapter written and hope to have it out soon.
> 
> In the meantime, feel free to come say hi on my tumblr: lysces-96.tumblr.com

After a win that was a little too close for comfort, the Samwell Men’s Hockey team piled back onto their bus glowing with both the elation of victory and sweat, but mostly sweat.

It was Friday night, and they were (narrowly) undefeated halfway through the preseason.  That meant a party.

To the disappointment of the masses, Holster reported that his little sister had already annexed the basement for sleepover purposes.  That meant a nontraditional party.

That meant a party at Johnson’s.

Jack didn’t know quite what to make of his goalie and captain.  He was solid on the ice, which Jack respected, but he was a hard person to read off the ice.  He melted easily into the background and only seemed to pop back into existence when he was needed.  Still, even when he flew under the radar, Jack had the vague sense that he was watching.  Judging, perhaps.

As curious as he was to see the peculiar goalie habitat, Jack really didn’t want to go to another party.  But as he looked around the bus, from Frosty trying to put together carpools to Shitty crowing about the prospect of getting schwasted to Bitty thinking aloud to Ransom about whether he had time to whip up a couple pies, and Jack realized that these disaster people of whom he was so fond probably needed a designated sober person.

And he was very firmly designated as sober.

Jack was still a little keyed up from the nail-biting game, and the anxiety wasn’t going away as quickly as he wished it would.  He’d been up late last night finishing a lab report, and underneath the lingering tension he could feel his exhaustion.  If ever there were a night to skip a party, this was it.

But, he reasoned, someone had to look out for the pies after Bitty went off to dance.

And that was how Jack Zimmermann found himself at a Haus party.

To add to his list of oddities, John Johnson apparently had no parents.  What he did have was a slightly dilapidated house that was too big for a lone teenager; a porch light that buzzed with electricity and fireflies; a green couch that, to Bitty’s histrionic horror, looked somehow infected; a conveniently placed window that allowed one to climb out onto a section of the roof; a mess of a kitchen stocked, to Bitty’s even greater horror, exclusively with dozens of bottles of sriracha.

Jack didn’t know what kind of cryptid Johnson was, and he was frankly too scared to ask.

He kept an eye to his teammates’ consumption but hung close to Bitty.  Jack was still unsettled by the unsolved mystery of Señor Bun’s kidnapping, and he didn’t think alcohol would make the kidnappers suddenly more civil.  Fortunately, Bitty seemed less interested in partying than he was in addressing the atrocity that was Johnson’s kitchen.

And that was how Jack Zimmermann found himself doing a hockey cryptid’s dishes at a Haus party.

Bitty made a noise of disgust as he handed Jack another dish.  He couldn’t say whether what was crusted on it was ever once human food.  He wondered what hockey cryptids ate as he scrubbed it out.

“How does he live like this?” Bitty cried, lifting a frying pan so he could clean the stovetop.  “This is sacrilege.  No kitchen should be treated like this.  How did he even do this?”

Jack glanced up to where Bitty was pointing.  The rust-colored splatter above the stove could have been old tomato sauce.  Or blood.  Or sriracha.

“It’s really something,” Jack agreed.

“I’m not bringing my pies in here until this place has stopped being an offense against everything good and holy.”

“I can’t say I blame you.”  The pies were presently safe in Lardo’s Jeep, and their teammates hardly missed them if the sounds from the den were anything to go by.  The music sounded a little like ominous chanting, and Jack couldn’t help but wonder if his hockey team wasn’t currently being sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of a fey creature disguised as a goalie.  Either way, he had a very strong desire to go join the pies in the safety of the Jeep.

Bitty whispered words of encouragement to the filthy stove as one might speak to a wounded animal.  “This is so much worse than the dust in the manor kitchen.  This is abuse—this is cruelty.”

“You are _so_ soft,” Jack marveled, but it was lost to the running water and the music.

“You’d never do this to an innocent oven, right Jack?”

“Never,” he swore.

“I don’t think I’ll ever look at Johnson the same way again.”  Jack privately agreed, but he was still much more upset by the unknown teammate(s) that had threatened Bitty.

The music changed, and they were joined in the kitchen by Ransom, looking for a bottle of water.  “Hey, guess what guys,” he said, grinning.  “Holster and I are taking March and April to the homecoming dance.”

“Really!” said Bitty.  “Congratulations!”

“Homecoming dance?” Jack asked, because he was an oblivious hockey robot.

“Yeah, bro, it’s at the end of the month.  You should get on top of finding a date before all the hot ones are taken,” he called over his shoulder as he returned to the party.

“I thought we had a rule about dating the hockey girls?” Jack asked.

“Do we?”  Bitty shrugged.  “I guess they’re not really dating if they’re just going to homecoming together.  I take it you don’t have a date yet?”

“I don’t know that I’ll go.”  High school dances held very little appeal to Jack.  He’d gone to one once and loathed every second.  He'd stood plastered to the wall listening to the grating pop music between his classmates' well-intentioned but awkward attempts to get him to dance.

Bitty shrugged again.  “I’d kinda like to go.  I’ve never been to one before.”

“Then you should go.”

“I don’t know who I’d go with.”  Bitty climbed onto the counter so that he could reach to clean the mysterious red stuff from the wall behind the stove.  He sounded a bit deflated.

“There’s tons of hockey players in the other room,” Jack pointed out.  “Pretty much all the girls showed up tonight.  March and April are taken, but you can just go up to anyone else and ask.  They’re your friends, and like you said, it’s not really dating.”

Bitty was quiet for too long, and when Jack glanced over, he was staring frozen at the mess on the wall.  Jack set the sponge down and turned the water off.  “Bitty?”

“I can’t,” he said in a small voice.

Jack dried his hands and hopped up on the counter beside him.  “Why not?”

Bitty shook his head, not turning to look at Jack.  “It doesn’t matter.  I don’t really want to go anyway.”

Jack didn’t buy that; there was definitely something there.  “You don’t have to go with a hockey player.  You don’t really have to go with anyone at all.  Meet up with some friends and don’t bother with a date.  You’ll have fun.”

Bitty considered it, worrying the rag in his hands.  “Would you want to go with me?”

Even though he’d just suggested Bitty go with friends, Jack really didn’t.  “I really don’t want to go.  But you can get a group together—talk to Shitty or Lardo, they’ll set one up.”

Still not looking at him, Bitty nodded shortly and climbed off the counter.  “Maybe,” he said, ditching the rag and heading into the other room.  A little thrown off, Jack followed suit.

The noise was much louder and the temperature a little higher.  His teammates were a rowdy bunch, laughing and drinking and dancing like normal teenagers, probably.  Bitty had disappeared immediately into the crowd, and as he scanned the room for him Jack’s eyes landed on Millie, who smiled and waved him over.

“Hey Jack,” she said, giggling for some reason.  He eyed the beer in her hand and guessed it to be her second or third of the night.  “Are you having fun?”

“Yeah,” he lied.  “You?”

“Absolutely!  I heard you scored tonight?”

Jack nodded.  It had been a nice goal, but it had nearly come too late.  He was still a little on edge.

“Congrats!  Oh, I wanted to let you know that I won’t be able to make it to our run tomorrow.”  She grinned and leaned towards him conspiratorially.  “I’m planning on scoring tonight too.”  Her gaze flicked to some point in the crowd, but Jack couldn’t tell who she meant among all the close-packed bodies.

“Good luck,” he said, and she spared him one last smile before walking away to seek her goal.  He hovered near the wall for a few minutes, ascertaining that no one looked close to passing out or like they were about to attempt anything dangerous.  Then he went back to the relative peace of the kitchen.  Bitty wasn’t there, and Jack didn’t really want to do any more cleaning, so he passed through to the hallway that led to the rest of the Haus.  Perhaps he could find a bathroom to hide in and play Sudoku.

Instead he found an open window with quiet conversation drifting through it.  Shitty and Lardo had climbed out to lounge on the roof, and they startled when he knocked.

“Hey Jack,” Lardo said, sitting up and scooting closer to Shitty to make room for him.

“Hey, nice night,” Jack answered, ducking through the window and out beneath the starry sky.

“Yeah, we were just saying that,” Lardo said.  “Good night for finding constellations.  We have four so far.  Want to join in?”

Jack regarded the stars.  There were so many visible out here, one of the few perks of living in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Ohio.  But he was at a loss to name any, as he wasn’t accustomed to giving them more than a passing glance.  “I don’t know many constellations.”

“Then make some up,” Shitty suggested.  “They’re all made up anyway.”

They stared up at the sky, and Jack pointed out a series of five stars that looked like a hockey stick.

“I see it,” Shitty said, nodding.

“Those are part of Orion, the hunter,” Lardo added, and when she pointed out the rest of the constellation, Jack could see it.  “The bright star at Orion’s shoulder—or halfway down the hockey stick—is the supergiant Betelgeuse.  The other really bright star at Orion’s knee is Rigel, also a supergiant.”

“Hey Shitty, it’s you,” Jack joked.

“I’m the brightest star in the sky,” Shitty preened.

“Rigel’s brighter, actually,” Lardo said.

“What a bitch.”

“Don’t insult the stars, Shits.”

“I’m only insulting Rigel for being an annoying diva.  The rest are fine.”

“Rigel’s just doing its best,” Lardo argued.  “Working as hard as it can to burn as hot as it can and shine as bright as it does.  And all for what?  It’s working itself to death, literally burning itself out until it collapses.  You don’t want to shine as bright as Rigel; it isn’t worth it.”

Shitty hummed, turning away from Orion to look for other patterns.  They sat in comfortable silence occasionally broken by the identification of a star or constellation.  Jack tried to take a picture of the sky, but he was dismayed to see that the stars wouldn’t resolve.  He deleted the black picture and took one of his friends instead, backlit by the warm light from the window and gazing up at the sky.  It was a picture of peace so at odds with his expectations for a party.

After a while, he excused himself with some regret to go check on the party.  As he made his way back, he ran right into Johnson, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.  “Jay-Z!  Glad I found you.  The party’s going great, no one is in danger of alcohol poisoning, and I think you’re needed in the kitchen.”  He kept walking, giving Jack no opportunity to respond.

There was very little apparent need for him in the kitchen, which was now clean.  Bitty must have returned to it at some point.  It was actually a nice-looking kitchen when it wasn’t trashed.  He could imagine Bitty on a sunny morning making pie at these counters and chattering to whomever was there to listen.  It was a pleasant imagining, especially compared to his earlier visions of Johnson devouring the innocent, dripping with blood and sriracha, in this kitchen.

As if called by his imagination, Bitty entered the kitchen balancing a pie in each hand.  “Oh!  Jack.”

“Hey.  Need a hand with those?”

Bitty silently set them on the counter.  He didn’t answer, but he pulled plates down from a cabinet and forks from a drawer.

“Everything okay, Bits?”

“Yeah, fine.”

He set the plates on the counter beside the pies and stared at them a bit, face blank.

“So what kind of pies are these?”

“Huh?” Bitty glanced up at him. “Oh, apple and cherry.”

He looked away again.

“Oh, neat,” Jack said.

The silence stretched thick enough to cut with one of those nifty triangular pie servers.

“Do you know where Lardo is?” Bitty asked abruptly.  “I think I want to go home.”

“Yeah, but—are you sure you’re okay?”

Bitty squeezed his eyes shut and nodded.

“You know if something’s bothering you, you can tell me,” Jack said.  “We’re friends, right?”

Bitty just stared at the plates.  Jack waited.

“I’m gay,” he said, so softly that Jack nearly missed it.

“Oh."  Jack hadn't wanted to assume, but this news didn't exactly surprise him.  "Me too.”

Bitty’s head snapped around to stare incredulously at him.  “Wait—you are?”

“Well, uh, bi.  But yeah.  Um,” Jack said, eloquent as ever.

Bitty was still staring at him in something akin to shock, and Jack wasn’t surprised.  He knew he didn’t scan as queer, and that had always been intentional.  Jack kept his sexuality private not only to avoid feeding the ravenous press, but also for the more mundane reason that most queer hockey players shared: men’s hockey was often a septic tank full of hypermasculinity and homophobia.

“I just,” Bitty said, “I’ve never met anyone else before.”

“Really?”

“You’re the first.”  A slow smile spread across his face until it looked like his cheeks might pop.  “This is fantastic!  Y’know, right now I don’t even care that there’re some assholes on the team.  I have a friend who’s bi!”

Jack was suddenly taken back to the first time he had found another queer hockey player.

_“That’s kinda gay, Parse,” Walker had said from his locker, in response to a comment Jack hadn’t heard, and Jack’s head jerked up._

_“So what if I am?” Parse had thrown back with a sharp smile, just enough edge to it that it could have been a joke.  Could have, but Jack knew the voice Parse used when he was joking.  It was just slightly off of that._

_Perhaps it was wishful thinking, Jack told himself.  He was just hearing what he wanted to hear._

_Some twenty minutes later, Jack fell into step beside Parse as they were lugging their gear towards the bus. “It’s cool,” Jack said quietly._

_“What?”_

_“If you’re gay.  It’s cool.”_

_“It’s cool, then,” Parse said, a corner of his mouth curving up in a smile that made Jack’s stomach flip.  He was so unconcerned, so unshaken by the magnitude of the revelation he’d just dropped on Jack like it was nothing of significance._

Jack blinked, and the blond kid smiling at him was Bitty once more.  For some reason, this smile made Jack’s heart ache.

“Yeah, Bits, you’re not alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> Some dialogue was borrowed from the comic. Everything belongs to N. Sadly, I am not N.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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